7 Mar 2018

Hello Hello,
Another long break from the blog. A lot has however happened in my world. Things are moving along with Unintended. It's not quite finished yet, but I've started to beef up on the marketing and everything around it. Here are the few main things:

So. I did not want to sell this under Shiver Games for various reasons. (mainly the theme is so different.) So I've started a new company for my solo work. It's called Aikio. Which is just my last name. I also created a small and simple website for it. Nothing too fancy there. But there was a lot of work to be done on getting domains, registering companies and etc. All is done now. Yei!

I also did some updating of the original webpages. I still plan to update it a lot more, once I have the time, but I'm fairly happy with the key art floating on the page. Here's gif of the same thing. As you can see the fourth character is also there and fitting with the rest fairly well, I would say. I also feel that it's important to include bunnies. Yes, we need bunnies.

This would be the most important thing. I think this will be my main avenue to attract interest. I will be following the progress closely and trying different things there. The wishlisters are what interests me the most at the moment, so be sure to do that if you can. I will be most grateful :)

As you can see a lot has been happening in terms of Unintended and that's not to say that I haven't been busy with Lucius also. I have. But can't really be showing too much of that now :)

We are getting some Lucius testers this friday and then I'm off to another trip. This time it's Kap Verde! Wuhuu!

7 Feb 2018

I once again took a few weeks off from posting here. My thoughts have been mostly with Lucius lately and I'm unable to show stuff from that yet. It's not really a good idea to show unfinished stuff from that.

In L3 we are mostly just concentrating on Animations now and the actual puzzles. Finalized version of the main player model is starting to be done and also the first 3 chapters are starting to be fully ready. Soon we will start doing some testing sessions.

As for Unintended. I've been starting to look into some key art and finally creating the last playable character.

Both are still a little WIP.

I wanna keep up with the style of weird hats, and possibly that's the reason why they will survive the sudden winter that strikes here.

Some key art also is in the works. Still working on it, but something like this I'm thinking I'll put on the Steam page. Still need to however do some work on it and try to bring forth the things that matter the most.

I think I still need to add some more of the game areas there. The windy city and the lava world.
It's coming a long. Maybe on the next post I will already have a Steam page ready so people can start wishlisting it and testing it through Steam :)

27 Dec 2017

Well well well. It's been too long. I've not been writing for a while now. I've been a bit lazy I guess.
Well that changes today. So what has happened in December? Mm..

Unintended

Progress has been pretty slow on this front. I've let this one sit a bit until I figure out the next puzzles of the Windy City.

I think I have something now that makes some sense. I've added these characters that Live in the Windy City, but the players are not able to understand them before they learn the language through some tribulations.

Inside the buildings I'm planning some Cog puzzles that are most of the obstacles in the way of the parts that are needed for learning the language. I'm thinking it's a magical book series, or something.

Only after knowing the language will you be able to find the hidden item from this city. The third elemental item that is needed to enter the last world.

Finland 100 Anniversary.

This was one of the biggest things to happen this year. Finland turned 100 years. During the year I've been working on an event for Steam for this occasion with the help of some colleagues here in Finland. The idea came in some conversations with our neighbors (Oddrok) and we decided to try and pitch Steam something for the occasion. First we gathered some of the bigger companies from Finland on-board. (Housemarque, Frozenbyte, etc.) Once we had a good group of 7-10 Finnish companies, we pitched it to Steam with a possibility of gathering 100 Finnish games to the event.

Steam said yes to our initial pitch and we continued working on this throughout the summer. I tracked down around 60 companies from Finland and asked if they wanted to be a part of it.
Mostly I just used this Steam curator to help me find the right ones. First a lot of the big ones were hesitant to join, even though they found the idea of the event great. Eventually Steam managed to get the rest on-board. We asked Neogames if they could help with some of the art for the event and they actually did. In the end steam took that art and made it so that it fit well on their pages.

The event ran from 5th of Dec to 8th of Dec and we had around 96 games on sale that day.
Suffice to say, I was very proud of it. It had a spot on the frontpage and most reported very good results from the sale. We did around ten times our normal sale events in revenue which is really great.

Thanks for everyone involved there. Warms my heart, that we can get something like this done.

Lanzarote

During the same time that Finland was celebrating it's big day. We, with some friends were actually on a vacation in Lanzarote, Spain. We rented a nice villa called Villa Antonio. I have to say that it did not disappoint. It was so nice to get away from this gray weather we have here.

The weather was fantastic. Most of the time we had around 20°C to 25°C.

Movies

So I went to see Star Wars of course and I was already warned about it being bad. However I was pleasantly surprised about it. I kind of liked this one much better than the earlier part of this trilogy.

There were a lot of the same nonsense of course, but I enjoyed also some parts much more. I felt like they fixed a lot of the issues I had with the earlier part. (That mask and etc.)

Even though It was a long movie, I never really felt like I was bored or anything. I would rate it 8/10.

So while looking for something to watch at home, we came upon this Musical from few years back. I was very sceptical about it, but went along for the ride anyway. The movie was crazy long and felt like it. Right after the movie was over I was left with pretty mixed emotions. Almost every line in this movie came through a song. A lot of it could have been just regular acting. However after few days I notice that I'm still thinking about the movie and the epic plot it had. The songs kept ringing in my head and I'm now listening them from Spotify. I read some of the history of this story and started to play with the idea of possibly reading the 1900 page original novel from the nineteen hundreds.

I think it was all together a very nice movie and I can see why it got some Oscar nods too.. 7/10

Okay. Maybe that will do for now?

I wonder which is better. Having this much stuff in one post or having the posts split into smaller ones?

I also wonder if I should just stick to mostly game development stuff instead of these random subjects.

8 Nov 2017

Hi all.
It's been a while. I skipped last week's post since I didn't really have anything interesting to say. This week however, I felt I had to mention a few things.

So here we go..

Unintended has been progressing a bit. I've finally started the "Windy City". I posted this picture last week in twitter. It's an initial tilemap test and overall style sketchup.

I like the volumetric light and I feel like the clouds are also shaping up nicely. This week I continued to work on some of the buildings in the area. I played around with some different building perspectives for this level, but after some consultation I decided to go with simple high rising buildings.

Here's the current progress with them:

I will probably continue on these a little more to flesh out some stuff around it, but I still feel pretty happy with it.

My rib seems to be finally fully healed and so I'm back in the gym :) That's nice. Does eat some unintended time, but I think it will be worth it.

We've been working on some patches for the Lucius games. We released a Simplified chinese patch for Lucius 1 and saw a significant jump on the sales during the Halloween sale. The figures did quiet down after the sale but the percentage seems very high still. Definitely worth it and paid itself probably in the first day. So that's nice. We also released a patch for Lucius demake (Pc/Android). It has some improvements in the overall game and also the simplified Chinese. Let's see how that goes.Ryan Clarke mentioned in his twitch video about the crazy numbers that (I think) PUBG brought in.

So this is what has been the talk lately:

So this is from the Steam hardware survey and it says that already 56% of the total steam users speak simplified Chinese. It's quite crazy. Anyway this means that probably all my games in the future will have Chinese on launch day. I will try to collect some more numbers for our results in and post about them, once I have at least a month or two of sales to draw from.

11 Oct 2017

Hi.
So. Still working on the misty forest. Adding some new elements to the whole light reflecting puzzles. I've added a darkened area to the map that you will have to illuminate. This darkened area is infested with wolves but luckily they will steer away from fire.

Hopefully that gives a clear enough idea of the situation. I'm liking the forest now a lot more. Maybe I'll add some rats until getting to the clouds.

Lucius Demake is out now for Android.
It's not really doing much sales yet, but we'll hope for the best around halloween.

It costs 2.99$
All the support would be appreciated :)Our office move has not been the best ever experience. A lot of the construction were still underway when we got there with our truck. They are now saying that they will be ready in a month or so.

27 Sep 2017

Pheeew..
I've been so lazy lately. Never do sports. Had to take some x-rays and it turns out, I have a broken rib! I would love to say that this is the reason why I haven't been updating much, but it's not really the case. I've just been lazy. Next friday we are going to be moving our office to a new location. It's exciting. The office is slightly smaller, much cheaper, and probably much nicer. It's still being renovated. The old building is going be renovated too, so that's why we had to move. Anyway all good! We are cutting down some expenses and hopefully that will translate to some good stuff for Lucius III.

Speaking of Lucius. We are almost done with the Android version of Demake and will be soon releasing it. Maybe slightly before Halloween in hopes of Halloween featuring. It will be available in the Play store and the Amazon store. (hopefully).

Other big Lucius news: We also released Demake in the new Jump platform. It's a subscription based service that doesn't use any streaming. It has mostly small, but highly curated bunch of games.
I like it!

About Unintended...
I've been still working on the Misty Forest parts. Mainly I want to add another sort of boss type of fight. So I'm just adding some creatures and stuff before we get to the Windy City.
Here's an example of a spider I've been working on. It has been quite a challenge to get it working. So far I have no ideas how to add a puzzle to this. Perhaps it will be enough to just avoid it. I don't know yet. I'm hoping to eventually combine all the forest parts to one large combination of things.

So here's the spider:

I like it so far. Just needs some more stuff to really stand out. I figure I need quite a few of these more interesting parts to the game, so It's easier to market it.

Well.. That's about it for now.
I'll update some more in a week or two.

6 Sep 2017

Very busy weeks. Bunch of gamedev parties and stuff. I also started a new hobby, so I'm just going to give a quick update on the Unintended progress. It's some footage of the Misty Forest.
This is fairly empty still but I plan to add some more creatures once I have some time. The Misty Forest opens a path towards the Windy City and this is all behind an elaborate light reflection puzzle with several steps to it.

So.. As you can see, there's some spiders there already. I used the mud stick that I placed there just for the purposes of this video to close the spiderhole. Also you can see here the rotating mirrors that are in the woods. This is how you will be able to reflect the light around. What to do with that light then? You will have to play it yourself to find out.

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About Me

Hello, I'm a Finnish Game Developer from Helsinki. I've co-founded the Company Shiver Games and It's responsible of the Lucius Franchise. I've also done the music for our games for a while and I also do some projects on my free time.
I'm gonna be using this blog for giving some random thoughts and reviews of things, and maybe showing some stuff that I've been working on. It might be something I've been doing in the office or something I've been working on solo.